Basra, the cradle of Islamic culture. A reasoned analysis of the urban area that was the early home of Islamic Studies

The main reasons for the primacy of Baṣra in Islamic Studies can be establish within several different contributory factors which are partially attributable to objective reasons but also to prevailing anthropological, historical and political conditions. Baṣra is the only town set up in the VII century that can be considered to be really free from external constraints; a urban area that has always tried to make its decisions alone, and for this reasons, it has been often defeated by Umayyad or ‘Abbāsid armies, as during the Zubairid phase (683-691/64-72) or throughout al-Nafs al-Zakiyya uprising in 762/145. Baṣra’s defeat as a political actor in the first century, however, allow it to capture instead a significant role in the rise of early Islamic studies, greater than that of the capital Damascus. The ‘Arab Bedouin urbanization process and the simultaneous phase of Islamicization brought the appeasement of the ‘Arab pre-Islamic feeling of freedom and independence along with the first Muslim elaboration of religious studies. The consequences emphasized the Baṣra’s primacy in Islamic studies underlining the lack of designation concerning the orthodoxy and the un-orthodoxy of the singular religious aspect and without censorship because novelty and freshness does not directly imply undesirable innovation (bid‘a). This situation fostered, on the one hand, the emergence of a significant process of elaboration within cultural and religious-Islamic studies, which initially was not able to distinguish the mystics from Tradition, the Quranic studies from theology, and, subsequently, the attempt to elaborate an Islamic ethical society which rejected the division of the Umma (the Islamic community after the fitna al-Kubrā) and, as such, was capable to promote a process of society moralization, completely detached from political intrigue. This quietist approach is exemplified by Baṣra’s pre-Sufism movements, early theological schools, the presence of violent and non-violent Ḫariğites sects and the lack of aḥādīth makers against religious adversaries. Finally, Baṣra is the urban area in which free will had been reconciled within God’s transcendence without having considered disrespectful of ‘Allāh’s power, but in full compliance with his justice.